Why they were never going to destroy Kerry Schott

Mike Carlton

What a pack of clowns they are. What a bunch of jumped-up nongs they must have been. The Liberal Party back-room apparatchiks now parading before the Independent Commission Against Corruption are revealed, at last, in all their infantile stupidity.

"Yay black ops !" cries Tim Koelma, a pudgy Young Liberal and staffer to the soon-to-be-disgraced former state minister Chris Hartcher. He is emailing his brother, Eric, about a scheme to wreck the career of former Sydney Water chief executive Dr Kerry Schott.

"Black ops" are also a fantasy for another of these Hartcher twerps, Aaron Henry, whose idea of a wizard jape was to skulk about at night with a ladder, slashing the election posters of political opponents.

"It's a light-hearted thing in order to help keep Young Liberals engaged," he assured the ICAC.

Counsel assisting, Geoffrey Watson, SC, found this hard to believe and no wonder. Zap blam, politics as an Xbox game.

But beneath all the hilarity, there was some seriously nasty stuff afoot. The conspiracy to destroy Schott was as vile as it gets.

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In a nutshell, her great sin was to stand between the infamous Eddie Obeid & Co and a big bag of money, hundreds of millions of dollars. As the head of Sydney Water from 2008 to 2011, she was battling to stop the Obeids and their cronies getting their paws on lucrative contracts for their shonky shell company, Australian Water Holdings.

Bizarre schemes were hatched to besmirch her. Lies were concocted to bring her down. According to evidence before the ICAC, the lawyer and businessman Nick Di Girolamo, donor of that notorious bottle of '59 Grange to Barry O'Farrell, was one of the conspirators. The Liberal Party bagman and lobbyist Paul Nicolaou was allegedly another. The ICAC heard that he had fired off an email to Alan Jones asking him to savage her on his radio show.

Curious, I made some inquiries about Schott. She turns out to be an extraordinary woman. The doctorate is in pure mathematics from Oxford. An economist by trade, she has been a merchant banker, working in her early years for Malcolm Turnbull and later as the local boss of Deutsche Bank. She was a visiting professor at Oxford and Princeton, a senior NSW Treasury official, chairwoman of the Environmental Protection Authority, an adviser to the Reserve Bank and a trade practices commissioner. Now in semi-retirement, she is on the boards of Macquarie University and the National Broadband Network.

Turnbull sang her praises when I spoke to him this week. "She's outstanding," he said. "A woman of enormous integrity and great ability. You may quote me on that."

And that assessment cuts across party lines. Michael Egan, former Labor state treasurer and now chancellor of Macquarie University, gave her a similar big rap. So, too, did Bob Carr. The current Premier, Mike Baird, appointed her to audit the books when the Coalition came to power in 2011.

This, then, is the measure of the distinguished public servant that this gang of tiny minds was seeking to ruin. It is incredible that they thought they could get away with it.

Parer's War

Ignoring television's annual orgy of preening and back-slapping at the Logies last Sunday, I switched to ABC1 to watch a new Australian drama, Parer's War.

Damien Parer is a hero of mine. Born in Melbourne in 1912, he was the first of the great combat cinecameramen, a man so brave and accomplished that he won an Academy Award for Kokoda Front Line! – his 1942 documentary of the war in New Guinea. The citation for the Oscar spoke of the film’s "moving presentation of the bravery and fortitude of our Australian comrades in arms".

Parer and his mate, the ABC journalist Chester Wilmot, set the benchmarks for Australian war correspondents ever since. He was killed at just 32, shot by a Japanese sniper at the US Marine landing on the Pacific island of Peleliu in 1944.

I'm delighted to report that Parer's War did him justice. The screenplay soared. So often the dialogue in Australian TV historical stuff clanks like a stick banging a bucket – "Cripes, stone the crows, cobber!" – but this writing was acutely tuned to the times. The production values were tremendous, especially in the battle sequences. Matt Le Nevez’s portrayal of Parer was broad and deep, elegantly complemented by Adelaide Clemens as Parer's wife, Marie, and Rob Carlton (yes, distant cousin) doing the newsreel titan Ken G. Hall.

All in all, a terrific 90 minutes of television. Until, at the very end, the ABC stuffed it. Buggered it. Wrecked the final moments with such fat-headed, intrusive crassness that I am still angry days later as I write this.

Picture the scene: Marie Parer is reading Damien's last letter home. He is dying in battle. Chester Wilmot brings her the news. Smack bang in the middle of this heartbreaking climax – the music score alone was enough to make you weep – a bright blue graphic pops up at the bottom of the screen. Some weevil in the ABC promotions department has decided this is just the moment to barge in with a plug for the following program. "NEXT," it says. "JACK IRISH: BLACK TIDE." The spell was broken.

And the intrusion didn't stop there. Minutes later, when the credits rolled, they were squashed unreadably into the bottom half of the box so the audience could be bombarded with more promo blah. "Coming up now on ABC1 . . . " If you wanted to know who played whom, who wrote what, as I did, you couldn't make it out.

It was an insult on three levels: to the memory of Damien Parer; to the filmmakers who produced Parer's War; to the viewers so condescendingly treated as ratings cannon fodder. Arses should be kicked and apologies made. But with the ABC's haughty reluctance ever to admit error, I'm sure they won't be.

Correction

A correction. Last week I wrote that Neville Wran had set up the office of the NSW Director of Public Prosecutions. He didn't. The idea was put up by the Labor attorney-general, Terry Sheahan, and pushed through by Wran's successor, Barrie Unsworth. Sorry about that, although I was in good company: former DPP Nick Cowdery made the same mistake.